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Windfall Light: The Visual language of ECM
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| Artist: Book |
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| Label: ECM |
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Regular Price: $84.95
On Sale For: $45.97 |
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| Year: 2010 |
| Format:
Book
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Following the success of "Sleeves of Desire", a second publication is now being devoted to the cover art of the label ECM, Edition of Contemporary Music, focusing above all on sleeve design from 1996 to the present. Since its founding in 1969, ECM has been dedicated primarily to jazz and contemporary classical music and is a leading international label in both these fields. ECM has also received acclaim for its unique cover designs, which have always been an integral part of its productions.
Over the years, the collaboration between Manfred Eicher, the label’s founder and producer, and designers including Barbara Wojirsch, Dieter Rehm and Sascha Kleis has produced an aesthetic of the cover that initiates a dialogue between the photographic image and the music. The search for a cover motif from a storehouse of possible images is presented in a few examples that shed light on how these visual worlds are created and trace their significance for the music. An illustrated catalog of all of ECM’s releases completes this publication.
448 pages.
Windfall Light follows upon Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM as an entry point in book form to the engaging universe of ECM, the Editions of Contemporary Music, established by Manfred Eicher back in 1969. 40 years later it occupies a most respected place in the (serious) music industry.
Horizons Touched was a prismatic testimonial of the spirit animating the ECM project through the eyes of many of the musicians and collaborators who were part of the ECM story. What I learned from that book is that ECM is unlike any other record label. In fact, to see it only as an economic venture - with a mission to efficiently push "audiocontent" into the market - would be to misunderstand what ECM is about. Remarkably enough, ECM in itself is a work of art, a breathing and living whole that links a community of artists to a community of music lovers, driven by an ethos of love and respect for the music and the creative process from wich it emerges. For me personally moving into the ECM orbit has resulted in a genuine revolution in the way I listen. There is something in the way in which ECM brings music in the listener's personal sphere that forces us to take notice, to become an active part of the unfolding musical process rather than simply a consumer. The distinctive and authoritative ECM sound plays an important role in drawing the listener into the music. But it's not only a matter of sonics. Also the careful packaging, with imaginative artwork on cardboard sleeves and CD booklets, prepares us by creating, in all kinds of provocative and counterintuitive ways, the right mood.
Windfall Light is a book about the ECM artwork and covers. It supersedes the earlier ECM Sleeves of Desire : a Cover Story, published in 1996 and no longer available. As with the previous volume it's Lars Müller who is responsible for the editing and publishing of the book. In a short essay, he explains how the book has been conceived as a visual score, punctuated by five short texts, challenging the reader through an idiosyncratic rhythm of CD covers, session pictures, double spread cover photos and a few stills from JL Godard movies. The final section of the book is devoted to a full catalogue, showing each and every of the more than 1000 covers produced over the years.
What becomes clear from browsing through these pages and trying to make sense of this giant visual puzzle, is that there is, yet again, no "system". There are covers with pictures, with abstract graphic work, with text. There is colour and there are grey tones. There are sharp pictures and there are blurry images. There doesn't seem to be a trick to bring us, listeners, systematically in the right mood to listen to a particular piece of music. Most often the connection with the music is obscure. What we see is often provocatively un-photographic. We see a lot of scenes from nature, but hardly any genuine landscapes. Urban settings return on ECM covers in many guises, but pictures of architecture or cities as a whole are far and few between. There are motto themes but visually they are distinctly minimalistic. We see great expanses of (most notably) water and sky. The subarctic north is very present in its mineral pureness. We see urban non-places, filled with shadows and fleeting silhouettes. There is snow, that strange and amorphous element that is able to poetically transform our lifeworld overnight. ECM covers seem to tickle our receptivity to the music by withdrawing rather than to make a statement. Sometimes there is only the faintest hint of what the image is about. It speaks of transience and fragility. "The contrast of light and darkness, of proximity and distance, of clear etched contours and fuzzy boundaries presents the visible world as a reduced form of a richer reality that remains - and has to remain - invisible" (Hilmar Frank on Caspar David Friedrich). |
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